Hi everyone and welcome to
another video on Windows 11. As you might have heard, since a few days, Microsoft has released their 2023 update
of Windows 11, better known as 23H2. As I did some earlier videos on getting Windows 11
on unsupported hardware, this one is no different and covers performing a fresh installation
of Windows 11 23H2 on unsupported hardware. There are several other scenarios
that might apply for you as well, so I decided to cover these in separate videos. As mentioned, this one is about performing
a fresh Windows 11 installation. Other videos will be about upgrading to Windows
11 23H2 when you would already be on a previous windows 11 version or about upgrading
from Windows 10 on unsupported hardware. For these different scenarios I've
put a card here and you can find a link in the description to these videos as well. Now, since Microsoft released
Windows 11 in October 2021, there has been some hardware limitations.
These limitations include a limited list of processor support, the requirement
for secure boot and a TPM 2.0 module. In case one of these requirements on your
machine is not met, you have an unsupported system and without any workarounds you will not
be able to install Windows 11 on that machine. For this video I'll use my trusty Dell
Optiplex 9020, which I also used for previous videos on Windows 11. It's equipped
with a fourth generation Intel Core i5 CPU, which is not supported, and it doesn't
meet the TPM 2.0 requirement either. So in short: this machine is
not officially compatible or qualified to run Windows 11 by Microsoft. If you would try to do a fresh
installation without any workarounds, this is the message that you will see. In the next steps we will prepare a USB drive
that will work around that and it will be usable to do a fresh install of Windows 11 23H2 on
unsupported, but also on supported, machines. The preparation steps which I will do will also
take place on this machine but they can be done on another PC as well. It doesn't have to be
supported or even run Windows 11 for that. With the first version and also last year's 22H2
version, doing a fresh installation consisted of using the Media Creation Tool, which is offered by
Microsoft, to create a USB drive, then boot from it and disable the hardware checks by setting
some values in the registry while installing. After testing that same method for 23H2, when using the Media Creation Tool to
create a drive and use it to install, you can still bypass that limitation for the
hardware but the resulting installation is only on version 22H2. From there you can perfectly
follow then the upgrade from 22H2 to 23H2 for unsupported hardware but of course this takes
extra effort, time and additional downloading. The way to not have this, is
to directly use the ISO from Microsoft's website instead and use
that to do the fresh installation. I did try this by booting from the ISO directly
in a virtual machine. Using the known registry workarounds you do end up with 23H2 directly,
but for most of us, using that ISO directly or to burn it to a DVD is not very handy as
we tend to use a bootable USB drive instead. So this time, for 23H2, the easiest method
will be to use Rufus to create a bootable USB drive. This tool will allow you to
use the ISO as a source and, even better, you can also immediately disable the
hardware checks while creating the USB drive. Enough talking. Let's get
started with all of this. To begin, let me insert the USB drive in the
PC. This has to be at least 8 GB in size and, as I mentioned, you can create this
on any other Windows machine. It doesn't have to be the one where
you'll be doing the installation. In case you would have issues with your USB drive or there might be an issue with leftover
boot partitions or weird flags on it, I've included some steps at the end of
this video in order to clean this up. But for now we'll assume you have a regular
and working USB drive in good condition. The first step now, is to download the tool
that I mentioned: Rufus. I have put a link to their website in the description but you can
easily find them by typing Rufus in Google. On the website, scroll down to the
download section. I decided to go for the portable edition but the
standard edition would do as well. And once downloaded, navigate to your
Downloads folder and start the tool. Make sure you click Yes to allow for
application updates, as without this, Rufus will not be able to download ISOs. Make sure your USB drive is the one listed in
the Device field and change this if needed. Then in the Boot selection part, click on the
drop-down and select Download. Then click on Download itself in order to first download
the list of available operating systems and once that is downloaded, select Windows
11 from the list and click continue. Select the only release that is available, click continue again and then
do the same for the edition. As you see, this ISO has all versions
included so it can be used for a Home or Pro installation, depending
on which activation key you have. Now select the language that you want
and, once again, click on continue and then x64 is the only architecture available,
so select that and then click on download. Save the ISO somewhere in your Downloads folder
and let Rufus take care of downloading everything. Once the download completes, the boot selection
will be automatically populated with the ISO file as you can see. And we can start
creating the USB drive by clicking on Start. Now this is where it gets interesting.
In this Windows User Experience dialogue, as I mentioned, we can already
apply the required workarounds. The first checkmark is exactly
what we're looking for: to bypass the hardware checks
for unsupported hardware but the other options are pretty useful
as well and can save you some work later, so I decided to also remove the requirement
for a Microsoft account, automatically let the installer create my user account, disable
the privacy settings and bitlocker encryption. Double check the device you selected
as it has to match with your USB drive, and then click OK to start the process. Now you will need to wait a bit, as it takes some time for all the data to
be copied to the USB drive from the ISO. All right, the status is Ready, so the USB drive creation is complete and
we can use it now to do a fresh install. So insert the drive into the machine where you
want to perform the fresh install and boot it up. Press the required key combination to bring
up the boot menu, in my case this is F12. As we can see, this machine
is configured for UEFI boot, so I need to select the USB drive
under the UEFI entry and press enter. If your machine would be
configured for legacy boot, the easiest is to enter the BIOS
setup and change this to UEFI booting. If this is not an option, you can recreate
the USB drive with Rufus but then you have to select the MBR option instead of
GPT in the partition scheme option. After I selected this entry, it will start
the Windows installer from the USB drive. From here, the installation is just
like any other windows 11 install. Select the language, regional settings
and keyboard layout and press Next. In the next screen, click on Install now, accept the license terms, click next and choose for a custom installation here. As we want to do a clean installation, I will select each existing partition
on my internal drive and delete it. Then I can just select the full
unallocated space and click next. This will let the installer create whatever
is necessary and use the whole drive. From here it's mainly waiting as the installer
will copy all files to your internal drive, perform a reboot and complete
the rest of the installation. If all goes well you should end up with this setup
dialogue. Typically here I would work around the requirement for a Microsoft account but since we
already did that while creating the USB drive, we don't need to do that anymore and you only
need to go through a small amount of steps. So let's select our location, keyboard layout and, after confirming that we don't
need a second keyboard layout, the installation will
continue with the last steps. There we go. Our fresh Windows
11 23H2 installation is done. Let's double check that by going
to Settings > System > About and indeed we have 23H2 here, just as we
wanted. Let's double check now if we have the new features available as well, so let's
go to Taskbar settings > Taskbar behaviors and, as you can see, the option to never combine
taskbar buttons and hide labels is here. And after aligning the start button to the left, this finally goes back to the
way I always have liked it. When opening File Explorer we can see that we
have the new 23H2 browser-like interface as well. And to confirm, once more, "winver" shows
us that this is definitely Windows 11 23H2. One last thing which is a good idea to do,
is to install missing drivers through Windows Update. And this answers a question which you
might have got right away as well. Yes, Windows updates do come in just fine on here,
even though we're on unsupported hardware. That was it for the video, I still
have a small additional part after this where I explain how to clean up a
USB drive if needed, but first of all: Thanks a lot for watching, let me know
how this worked for you in the comments and if you have some questions as well,
let me know there and I'll do my best to provide an answer. If you have liked this
video, a thumbs up is always nice and if you are into this kind of videos, feel free
to subscribe to my channel of course. Now in this last part I will show you how to
clean up a USB drive if that would be needed. Especially if you had used to USB drive on
a non- Windows operating system it might not be properly detected on Windows or give you
troubles when trying to get that ISO on there. These small steps will prevent any
potential issues with leftover boot partitions or weird flags on the drive. So to do this, launch a command prompt by clicking on start or pressing the Windows key
and type in "cmd" followed by enter. In the command prompt, type
"diskpart" and press enter again. Here, give the command "list disk". This will give you a list of disks in your system. In my case to USB drive is the
second entry here: disk one. So for the next command I need to
type "select disk 1" and press enter. Obviously you need to adjust this number with the
disk number you have there for your USB drive. Disk one got selected, so now we will
clean up everything that's on the drive. Just in case that this would not be clear already,
this does destroy all data that's on the drive, so make sure you selected the right drive and that
you don't have anything important left on there. Type "clean" here and press enter once more. At this point everything got
removed from the USB drive, so, before we can start to use it again, we will
need to recreate a partition on it first. For that, exit diskpart and then launch
"diskmgmt.msc" from the command prompt. In here we can see the USB drive
with all space as unallocated. Right click on this and
select "New simple volume". Click Next, leave it to use all
the space and click next again. Leave the selected drive letter, click next and here we can give the drive a
name or a volume label if desired, then click next again and finish
to start creating the volume. There we go... the USB
drive is ready to use again. Thanks again for watching and
hope to see you back here soon!
